The Lady Likes Business

» Homemaking, says Mrs. Buchanan, can be done in spare time. She pities those middle-aged women who haven’t real work.

by AIMEE BUCHANAN

1

IN THE middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” These words of Dante’s must have meant many different things to different persons, but to me, a woman, they symbolize the misgiving that a woman feels when she first realizes that youth is over, when she comes to the knowledge that some things are lost to her forever and will not return.

Perhaps the hardest thing about middle age to a woman is the inescapable realization that she is no longer the prime mover in anybody else’s life — not even in the lives of those she most loves. Some take this knowledge hard and torture themselves with it. Others divine that it is a universal experience and go on from there. Observation shows me that “home women” weather this personal disillusionment far less gallantly than do “career women.” And that is why, in middle age, I am glad that I belong to the latter group, although I find the title itself distasteful.

Like most other career women, I was made one by circumstances. I was a widow at: twenty-two. I had to earn my living, and at one period I had to contribute to my mother’s support. I have taken care of myself and others through a good many years of vicissitudes and emotional upheavals, first by teaching high school and later in the business world. Now in the early forties, I am full of delight in living. I cannot find hours enough in the day to see, to know, to learn, and to do all I aspire to. I hold a full-time job, and I write in the evenings and on Sundays; I have had the pleasure of seeing some of my work in print. My daily work demands that I read and learn more every day — for which I truly thank God. I would not, at this point, trade places with any home woman I know, although in the past I may more than once have envied such women t heir security, or their possession of homes and husbands, or their freedom from care. I can truthfully say that I have not envied them their idleness, except in those hours when I was sick or very tired. I have envied them their leisure, which, if I had it, I should employ in writing.

This is what happens to me often at the office. My telephone rings. I stop work to answer. A petulant voice says, “Please come over to dinner tonight. I’m so blue. You know Tom’s gone on another business trip, and I’m so lonely.” When I put the phone back in its cradle it is with a figurative bang. I am well aware that Tom is away. He is a busy, dynamic creature, a driver and a pain in the neck, a charming fellow and a good man to work with. He is a self-made man, very prosperous, very ambitious. His wife is blonde, petite, has beautiful feet and ankles, works hard at keeping her figure. Now that she’s over forty, the blondeness is turning a little tawdry, but she’s so beautifully dressed that it doesn’t matter. They have no children and they live in an apartment hotel.

Flora’s day begins about noon, when she has to get up to take Baby, the dog, out for a walk. Her other responsibilities are keeping her beauty parlor and dress-fitting appointments. Lately, it is true, the Red Cross has mitigated her boredom, and she is currently involved in the making of something called “pink flannel disaster panties.” Nevertheless when the time comes for the winter holiday in the south, she will forget about the Red Cross.

From dinnertime on, she expects her husband to entertain her, and if he is not home, someone else must take on the job. Whenever I see her, she tells me I am lucky to have a job — “something to do,” she wistfully puts it. Once she told me frankly that she felt she had little to live for, because her husband no longer has much time for her. This does not mean he does not love her, but he is busy and his work fully and completely satisfies him. She is miserable because she is just discovering, but cannot bear to face it, that she is important to no one in this world. It may seem hard of me to say it, but this is the truth. She has been brought face to face with the eternal problem of middle age — the question that echoes in the dark wood where the straight way is lost. The question is, I think, “What have I done with my life? Where am I going? What am I worth?”

Here is another home woman. She married while she was a freshman at college and when her husband was in his second year. Her husband, like Tom, is a markedly successful businessman. Their home has lacked neither money, nor affection, nor children. Now both sons have left, one to the Army, one to the Navy. The daughter is still in college, but she wants to marry a boy in the service. The mother, who all her life has been the center of her family, the leader and arbiter of every move, abruptly finds herself with no sons to direct, and to mother, and with a daughter in revolt against her home. The husband is contented with his business, his fishing, and his sports. He has not gone overboard because his children are leaving them.

But the mother is frantic because she is no longer the axis of a tight family group. In the last two years she has become an embittered woman, a source of anxiety to her husband and a burden to her friends, and all because she thinks her life has suddenly fallen to pieces. She attributes her troubles to the war, the wrong party in power in Washington, and her husband’s lack of interest; but more objective observers would say that she is simply refusing to accept the inevitable going away of the children from the home. It hasn’t yet occurred to her that she cannot continue all through life as the prima donna of her domestic stage, that she must find some more impersonal way of self-expression than the directing of her children’s lives. Because she is intelligent, she will probably eventually find out that there is a sense in which we live alone, as we die alone. We must learn to live as individuals, somewhere along the line, without the support of our families to our egos.

Take one more home woman, for good measure. This one has lost her husband by death and her children by marriage, but before that happened she had a long and happy family life. Now she is making a nuisance of herself to her four gifted children. Two of them live on the West Coast, one in Boston, and one in Cleveland. Not one of the four is ever fully free of the threat of a threeto six-month visit from “Mama,” who will expect as a matter of course to be consulted on matters which are plainly none of her business, who will be hurt if not included in everything, down to the dizziest cocktail binge, and who will throw fits of self-pity and tears while she tells her children she knows she is no use to them now, that they don’t love her any more, that she isn’t needed. She is financially solvent and could, if she would, make a dignified and comfortable existence for herself in a small apartment in New York, where all her old friends are. Instead she goes back and forth across the country, leaving a trail of irritated, humiliated, and anxious young people at every stop. She is still trying to be the young mother of thirty instead of a mature woman of fifty-five.

2

IT MAY be that my experience with home women is exceptional, but the woman who will not adjust herself to her changing environment is common enough to be well known to everyone. That is why I find it hard to accept the home woman’s criticisms of career women as valid. Here are two examples of women of a different type. One is a friend of mine who has never married, not because of lack of opportunity (in my opinion every woman not actually an idiot has an average of about four chances to marry per lifetime) but because she fell in love with a man who is not free. This friend might be called a career woman, although she certainly did not plan to be one. Like most other normal women, she wanted to marry. She has not allowed the long frustration in her life to embitter her. When she found that marriage was not for her, she went about making herself essential to her employer, and today she is the highest-paid woman in the company for which she works. She has always supported her mother.

Besides working at the office, she has been an avid reader. She has obtained a master’s degree in her university. She enjoys music, the theater, good food and drink. She does a great deal of unofficial good among her acquaintance, and she is an excellent friend. Long ago she earned the blood donor’s red ribbon, and she works at the Red Cross every week. (Many of the home women I know have never “had time” for Red Cross work.) For a realistic acceptance of the responsibilities of adulthood, I commend her. As she has never whined throughout youth, she is not whining in middle age. She is, in fact, a much happier and more attractive woman than any of the three mentioned before.

Here is another woman who works. She is a small, white-haired, warm-hearted creature who mothers everyone. After her husband died, leaving her with a twelve-year-old son, she did housework, waited on tables, and clerked in a department store. As soon as she could, she started to night school to learn accounting. No one will ever hear from her of the sacrifices she made and the work she did to send her boy through medical school. Now that he is an established doctor, she still goes every day to the office, where she is a valued income tax expert. The home she made and maintained for her boy is open to all kinds of young people — those from her office and her church, and the children of her friends. Being a career woman has not meant that she is any less the mother and the woman, but I believe being a worker outside the home has kept her vital, eager, interested, and able to share happiness with the world. She is a bigger wmnan than she might have been as a sheltered wife, and her son has certainly not suffered from having a career woman for a mother.

One thing I have never been able to understand in the mentality of my home women friends is their attitude toward women who work outside homes. There is a mixture of jealousy, fear, and envy. While, on the one hand, they make fun of our aspirations to positions competing with men, they also insist on envying us our “having something to do.” While few of them would be willing to live on the tenand eleven-hour daily schedule of the average businesswoman, they seem to resent the fact that some of us can work eight hours in an office and two or three more at home and like it. They sometimes talk as if career women were a race apart, quite devoid of the nicer human feelings like sympathy and love. They like to describe us as hard, calculating hybrid types, who prefer to live in hotels and have no human ties. As a matter of fact, most working w’omen t hat I know are ardent home-lovers who devote all their leisure to homemaking. And many career women do fall in love and marry and have children, just like other people. The fact that they can also carry full-time jobs should certainly not be in their disfavor.

3

I HAVE often wondered why the term “career woman” should have such an offensive sound? I dislike it myself, and know other business and professional women who do. I believe that most men think it rather silly, and of course home women sniff at it. Perhaps the career woman is getting the tail end of the prejudices hanging over from the Victorian era — prejudices against those females who dared to leave the fold when homemaking was really a career.

Nobody would deny that economically and socially the world today is different from the world of 1900, for within our own lifetimes we have seen technological wonders that have reshaped every part of living. Yet there are those who will not see that these great social changes could not help completely altering the economic position of women.

Women in our grandmother’s day were truly necessary in the home; they served instead of the machines and outside industries we have today. A society that did not know of frozen, dehydrated, and canned food, public bakeries and laundries and drycleaning establishments, vacuum cleaners and refrigerators, mass-produced textiles, hose, clothing, and shoes, central heating, apartment houses, day nurseries, electrical heating, lighting, and other aids, had to divide the labor; and to women was given the half of the business that involved food and clothing and care of the shelter, while man went out to get the money to maintain it. Women had to stay in the home so that it could funct ion physically. Theirs was a full-time, satisfying job, requiring great skill and management.

I say that American women are not now called upon to work full time in their homes as women used to do, although I fully realize that at the present moment, under wartime conditions, the young married women, and particularly those with children, are doing a spectacular job of homemaking, and they are doing it with humor and competence. War has stripped the privileged of their servants, as it has deprived us all, in part at least, of the once accepted commonplaces of special services like laundries and cleaning establishments.

These young matrons are today living a type of existence every bit as demanding as the pioneer life their great-grandmothers knew. They are taking full care of their children; they are doing their own cooking and cleaning. Some of them even do the washing for the family. In many instances these undaunted girls have set up their homes wherever their husbands have been stationed in the service, in order that their husbands might still enjoy the amenities of home and family. In so doing, they have put up with virtually impossible living conditions.

But I contend that there are many thousands of older women, whose children have left the home, who are not doing a full-time job, because their housekeeping has been taken out of their hands and much of it is performed outside the home. Consider the conditions of the peacetime existence of the average woman living in a city, and remember that there are many women for whom the war has made little change in home duties. How absurd to talk of housekeeping as a lifework, when the actual work is done outside the home by other women, working women, who do the preserving and cooking of your food, who sew your dresses and make your draperies, curtains, and bedspreads, who design and make your carpets, wash and iron your clothes, knit your stockings, weave your cloth, clean your apartment. (All these are things the pioneer American women did for themselves.)

What is not done outside the home is taken care of quickly with laborsaving devices. The trouble is that, in the fifth decade of the twentieth century, many older home women are suffering from a twentieth-century malady — unemployment. Mass production and the new machines have thrown them out of their traditional work. The homemaker is only a part-time worker now; no matter how glibly she talks about homemaking, she is not doing all that the word implies. As for her role as a mother, she might as well admit, too, that she sees little of her children after childhood and early adolescence, for her work is pretty well distributed to others.

This is not to deny the psychical and spiritual part of homemaking and child care. Yet career women have managed to take their part here too, for they see practically as much of their children as the home woman does, what with the demands made by the schools and other agencies on the child’s time. The career woman is with her children at breakfast and at night and on Saturdays and Sundays. It is up to the individual how much love, training, and home life her children get. As far as I can see, working mothers succeed fully as well at child care as those who stay at home.

That is why I say that, although the career woman may envy the sheltered woman throughout the earlier periods of life, at middle age she does not. There are too many discontented, drifting home women, their minds and hearts narrowed by half a lifetime of centering on a few persons, who at middle age are without philosophy to sustain them in their inevitable loneliness. Not only are they without philosophy, but they are without that employment of the mind that everyone needs at every stage of existence. Career women don’t have time for loneliness, for their minds and hands are still full of work.

If in the past the concerns of a business or the demands of a profession have seemed sterile and worthless beside the fullness of love and childbearing, now at last in middle life these impersonal things of our daily work are our comforters and friends. We know we are useful, we know what we can do, and so we are reasonably happy. Most of us learned long since what the home woman is finding out painfully now — that “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” You can’t have both.

It is hardly fitting for a career woman to give advice to those home women who find themselves and their lives empty now — emptier still because of what the war is doing to all humanity. But I will dare to do so. I suggest to any home woman who feels lonely and unwanted, and out of things, that she should read the newspapers, particularly the employment ads, that she should wipe away her tears of self-pity, put on her very best hat, and with the same kind of determined cheerfulness that carried her through domestic difficulties in the past, go out and get herself a job. Anything at all, from clerking in a store to waiting on table or doing spot welding.

And don’t be proud about it. Be glad that there is work for your hands and to keep your mind busy. If we don’t all work now, there may be no American homes to stay in after a while. I’m willing to bet that any woman who goes out and gets a job and really tries to learn something, anything, will find more joy in life than she believed possible. Work is a healer. Ask any woman who has survived twenty years of catching the 7.45.

The economic revolution that has prodded women out of the home is moving even faster now. After the war, the change will go on, and nothing can stop it. There will be more, not fewer, career women in the world of the future, and I am one to dare to think that the world — and the home itself — will be the better for it. Years ago I read in Emerson, “The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.” It took me a long time to understand that happiness very often consists in giving up some old thought or belief or desire. A woman especially needs to learn that.